It was the summer of 2006 and I’d just met a guy and couldn’t stop daydreaming about him. He was good looking with piercing blue eyes and dark hair. He…
Contemporaries Essays
Liberation on the Dance Floor: Rickie Vasquez and the Affective Politics of Brownness in My So-Called Life
The eleventh episode of My So-Called Life (1994-1995) includes a brief but influential scene that I have returned to repeatedly over the years since it first aired: Rickie Vasquez (Wilson…
Jordan Catalano, the Female Gaze, and the Importance of Being Beautiful in My So-Called Life
In seventh grade I started talking less and leaning more. It was 1994-95, the year of My So-Called Life’s only season, and the girls in my school were enthralled with…
Why Jordan Doesn’t Have “Dyslexia”: Refusing the Romance of Literacy in My-So Called Life
In Episode 7 of My So-Called Life, “Why Jordan Can’t Read,” the show’s central character Angela Chase learns that her crush Jordan Catalano has a learning disability and tries to…
My So-Called Teen Dramas
I came into adolescence in the age of the supernatural teen drama. Spanning across novels, television, and film from the mid-aughts through the 2010s, the likes of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight,…
The Voice of Winnie Holzman
My So-Called Life is full of Angela Chase’s voice. As the protagonist, the young teen’s thoughts — unfiltered, emotional, hilarious, self-involved — are threaded in voice-over throughout the series. The…
A Lover’s Discord: Angela’s Overanalyzing
“But what above love?” asks Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, as part of her attempt to reconsider the role that “passionate attachments” play in academic criticism.1 Such reconsideration…
Surreal butterflies and alternative kinship futures: revisiting dreams and histories of home through My So-Called Life
Parents! Racontez vos rêves á vos enfants! (Parents! Tell your children your dreams!) – Papillons surréalistes (Surreal butterflies), December 19241 In late 2017, I began writing down my dreams. In…
Moving Beyond Institutionalism
As a graduate student, and later as a junior scholar specializing in the literatures of the Americas, I sought out many books, articles, and reviews by members of the Post45…
Institutional Recalcitrance, Institutional Refractions
Jeffrey Lawrence’s “Mobilizing Literature” argues that Jamesonian cultural materialism and McGurlian institutionalism “have set the agenda for critical debate” among scholars of post-1945 US literature, and that these schools have…